#puberty-blockers

#puberty-blockers

Good Law Project revealed on Thursday (12 March) that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) temporarily halted the upcoming PATHWAYS trial because of concerns raised by cardiology physician professor Jacob George. The £10 million study, headed by King's College London (KCL), was designed to analyse the effects of puberty suppressant hormones, known as puberty blockers, on transgender youngsters.

NHS England is "separately reviewing the evidence for the use of MAF in adults with gender dysphoria" with the aim of launching a consultation on its findings in late 2026. A separate section clarifies that its ban on new prescriptions will only apply to youth gender services, adding that the NHS will continue to prescribe hormones for adult patients in its gender identity clinics (GICs).

Prof Jacob George, who was appointed chief medical and scientific officer at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in January, raised concerns that led to the Pathways trial being put on hold by the government, according to the Sunday Times. But the regulator announced on Saturday that George would recuse himself from involvement in the trial after gender-critical social media posts made last year emerged.

Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain's connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders - and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers.

Every day, many thousands of parents across the U.S. face the difficult question of whether to place their child or teenager on a psychotropic medication. Receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder can be scary and confusing, for the youth as well as their parents/caretakers. What is ADHD? Depression? Anxiety? OCD? Bipolar? What are the available treatments? Do we have to use medications to treat the symptoms?

When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored. A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola's brain was already producing hormones that had kick-started puberty.

As the shaky evidence base for youth gender medicine has become better known, activists have retreated to an argument from authority. Never mind the Cass Report, whose findings resulted in the closure of Britain's leading youth gender clinic. Never mind the study by a leading American practitioner showing that the treatments she championed did not improve minors' mental health. Never mind reports that some adolescents were being put on a medical pathway after only a single clinic visit. For advocates, the important thing to remember was that "gender-affirming care" for minors-puberty blockers and hormones, plus surgery in rare cases-was endorsed by all of the major American medical associations.

Legal experts at Good Law Project revealed in a Saturday (7 February) report that deaths by suicide among trans youngsters surged to 22 in England between 2021 and 2022. The number is nearly six times higher than reported deaths in 2020-21, according to its freedom of information (FOI) data, with at least four trans and non-binary young people in 2020-21. Comparatively, the number of reported deaths went down by one between 2019-20 and 2020-21.

Rady Children's Hospital stopped providing such care on February 6 in response to the current presidential administration's threats to end federal funding to medical institutions that offer gender-affirming healthcare. Superior Court Judge Matthew Braner said the case involved "an extraordinarily thorny issue" that placed the hospital "between a rock and a hard place," but said that ending the care would place the hospital's 1,900 trans youth patients under "a risk of relative degrees of harm," Voice of San Diego reported.

Administration health officials praised a statement released Tuesday by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) that advises against conducting "gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery" on people under the age of 19, even though such procedures are rarely conducted on minors. The ASPS based its statement on two recent reports from the U.K. and the U.S. that were widely criticized by transgender healthcare advocates as being biased.